Actions

An Action is a discrete unit of work that Ooyala Flex carries out on your behalf in order to get work done. Examples of Action Types are:

• Ingest: For example ingesting a media file.

• Transcode: For example converting a media clip from one format to another.

• Publish: Publishing your media to the appropriate platform.

An Action Type is an abstract term and relies on Actions (plugins) to implement specific work.

For example the Publish Action Type states that we are planning to publish some content to a remote platform. However, it doesn't specify which platform or how the content will be processed and delivered to a platform. This is where the Action or plugin comes in: An Action is a specific implementation of an Action Type.

If we take the Publish Action Type as an example again, you might be offered the following Actions:

Publish to YouTube

Publish to Daily Motion

Each of the above are Actions of type Publish.

We use the word Action and plugin interchangeably as an Action is a type of Ooyala Flex plugin. Plugins help developers to extend the functionality of Ooyala Flex in a simple, modular way. This model ensures that Ooyala Flex is extremely versatile and future-proof. New plugins can be created using Ooyala Flex’s API. So if, for example, a new Internet TV service (let’s call it "New TV") is launched, a developer could create a new plugin with the Action Type of Publish, and then deploy it to Ooyala Flex.

A typical instance of Ooyala Flex will have a default Action for each Action Type.
The default plugins are highly configurable to support lots of different scenarios.
When the default Action does not deliver the functionality you need, for example
publishing a video to YouTube, then you would utilise a more specialised Action.